Quotes by Edward Abbey
The rancher strings barbed wire across the range, drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds everywhere, drives off the elk and antelope and bighorn sheep, poisons coyotes and prairie dogs, shoots eagle and bear and cougar on sight, supplants the native bluestem and grama grass with tumbleweed, cow shit, cheat grass, snakeweed, anthills, poverty weed, mud and dust and flies - and then leans back and smiles broadly at the Tee Vee cameras and tells us how much he loves the West.
Abbey, Edward
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Abbey, Edward
For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!
Abbey, Edward
You can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamn contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbrush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you'll see something, maybe.
Abbey, Edward
Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.
Abbey, Edward
I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers.
Abbey, Edward
Fantastic doctrines, like Christianity or Islam or Marxism require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward.
Abbey, Edward
There has got to be a God; the world could not have become so fucked up by chance alone.
Abbey, Edward
J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty - you can always tell a shithead by that initial initial.
Abbey, Edward
Walking takes longer... than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed.
Abbey, Edward
There is this to be said for walking: It's the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog.
Abbey, Edward
Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialistic, otherworldly, New Age spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu and seaweed slime.
Abbey, Edward
No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County.
Abbey, Edward
The one thing worse than a knee-pad Tory is a chickenshit liberal. The type that can not say "shit" even when his mouth is full of it.
Abbey, Edward
The longest journey begins with a single step, not with a turn of the ignition key.
Abbey, Edward
Every analysis leaves a residue of the unknown; this we call God or Karma or - depending on time and place - the UFO. (Unidentified Fucking Object).
Abbey, Edward
When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
Abbey, Edward
Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.
Abbey, Edward
Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.
Abbey, Edward
Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit.
Abbey, Edward
Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris.
Abbey, Edward
Art, science, philosophy, religion - each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.
Abbey, Edward
Fire lookout, 1400 hours, ferocious lightning storm. Me and God. That fucker is trying to get me again, God damn him. But I got me old .357 ...
Abbey, Edward